Welcome

Welcome! My name is Justin Hosbey and I am a sociocultural anthropologist, interdisciplinary ethnographer, and a student of Black Studies. Broadly, my intellectual work is interested in the ways that Black Americans have resisted anti-Black violence from the beginnings of racial slavery through its afterlife — using, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, “every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non-violent.” More specifically, my ethnographic work explores Black social life in the U.S. Gulf Coast and Mississippi Delta regions, focusing on the ways that southern Black communities articulate insurgent modes of citizenship that demand the interruption of racial capitalism. Click here for my updated CV.

I am currently revising his dissertation, “Charter Schools, Black Social Life, and the Refusal of Death in Post-Katrina New Orleans,” into a book manuscript. This ethnographic project utilizes research methods from the digital and spatial humanities (specifically deep mapping, ArcGIS and Augmented Reality) to explore and visualize how the destruction of neighborhood schools in low income and working class Black communities has fractured, but not broken, Black space and place making in post-Katrina New Orleans.

I am also a proud native of Southwest Atlanta, Georgia. My next research project will be a historical ethnography of the families and communities impacted by the Atlanta Child Murders from 1979-1981.